Page 46 of Queen of Diamonds

The idea of her lifeless body, abandoned in a Las Vegas alley, the rich glow of her skin fading to grey, those bright eyes dull and lifeless…

A shiver ran up my spine, a tremor in my heart, and I shoved the image away.

No.

I slammed the laptop, running a hand through my hair as I got to my feet and crossed halfway to the door to her cell before I’d caught myself.

For what?

The compulsion to go in was overwhelming. I needed to look in there just to see the rise and fall of her chest… The life of an Omega who’d haunted me for years. Who’d broken me. Who I’d come to believe I would never see again.

She couldn’t die.

I couldn’t… I couldn’t hate a dead woman, and I was nothing if not hateful.

I took another step toward her door, but saw a flash of fluff at my feet, and lost my balance as I tried not to step on it.

“Fuck!” I crashed to my ass, turning in time to see Lucy diving under the couch.

“Did you kick her cat?” Kyan’s voice sounded from up in his pad, and his head poked up and over the railing.

“She tripped me,” I snarled.

A pair of white orbs flashed from the small gap beneath the couch.

Oh…

“I’m sorry, Lucy.” She might have been the one trying to kill me, but I had been wearing my boots. I crossed back toward the couch and knelt beside it, but Lucy backed up, then darted from beneath it. I poked my head up in time to see her leaping up the mismatched metal stairs to Kyan’s pad.

Well, she clearly wasn’t hurt—not like my pride as I caught Kyan’s smug expression and Lucy vanished into his pad. Suck up.

I glanced back to Glade’s cell. My nerves had dissipated, and I didn’t feel such a pull to check on her.

Probably for the best. So far, no interaction with Glade hadn’t gone to shit. Even last night, holding her in the shower and forcing her on her knees… I’d stayed up all night, resenting that it didn’t bring me the peace I knew it should.

I’d never struggled with vengeance before now, but it just… hadn’t felt good. It should have. I wasn’t a nice person, but every second I was around her unsettled me, a whisper just out of my vision, nagging that something wasn’t quite right—that hating her was a mistake.

I shook it off, returning to the couch to finish a job just so I could prove to myself she wasn’t getting to me.

Knight was right. She was a snake, and since I was the only one of us who could be trusted to speak to her, I had to be careful.

17

GLADE

Iwoke to the ghost of arms around my waist.

“Tell me,” Ace whispered in my ear. The sharp scent of redwood and roses lifted in the air.

Being the face of my nightmares wasn’t enough for Ace. How many times had he been there when I woke? Dragging me from one nightmare to the next, distorting reality so I could never escape.

Sometimes my dreams would cycle. I would wake to his arms around my waist, the brush of his breath on my neck, only for it to begin again. I woke over and over, never sure what was real and what wasn’t.

I focused on my surroundings, trying to find something to hold on to.

The filthy, bony mattress dug into my body, leaving me aching. The lights from the bathroom were on. I’d left them that way, and now, in the dim light, I stared at the wall. Concrete covered in cracked paint that might have once been a pleasant cream was now aged, dull, and grimy.

The room smelled dusty with a faint, damp scent from the bathroom, where I could hear the drip, drip, drip of the leaky shower. Their scents were here, too. Fainter than in the warehouse beyond, which told me this wasn’t a room they used much, but they were here.

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